Lost in Suburbia classic: That’s the way the corn chip crumbles

Tracy Beckerman More Content Now

Wednesday

Oct 9, 2019 at 6:25 AM

There’s something about riding in the car that transforms normal children with average appetites into ravenous, snack-ingesting monsters. It’s similar to what happened with Pavlov’s Dogs. No matter how much they have eaten prior to getting in the car, as soon as the kids are strapped into their carseats, they start to salivate. This means I have a choice of either listening to them complain incessantly for the duration of the trip about how they will die of hunger if they don’t eat something or I have to make sure that the car is as well-stocked as a convenience store.

Of course, the problem is not so much that I have to fuel up the car AND the children when we go for a ride, but rather, what happens to the car when the kids start eating. Here it becomes evident that riding in the car also turns normal children with average hygiene skills into complete and total slobs.

It goes like this: kids + food in car = humongous mess.

When they were little, the main source of the mess was Cheerios, the snack choice of champions and toddlers. But soon enough they graduated to cheesy goldfish, which brought a lovely orange, cheesy hue to the mix. Eventually they worked their way up to pretzels, corn chips, popcorn, and just about every other snack that falls apart when you eat it and gets magically sucked into the crevices of the car seats. By the time we would arrive at our destination, the car would look like there had been an explosion in a Frito-Lay factory.

As bad as it looked, though, it was not nearly as disgusting as it smelled. If I did not have the time to get the car washed and have the inside of the car suctioned off into a vast black hole of garbage on the other side of the universe, it would immediately begin to ripen and soon start to smell like an indoor stadium after a ball game. The kids would be immune to the smell since it is a well-known fact that their olfactory senses do not mature until adulthood

Clearly, this is not a good look for a car, no matter what. However, we soon learned that the resale value of your car depreciates significantly more when you have kids and are unwise enough to have purchased a car with cloth upholstery. If we had known that half-chewed bagels harden and form a permanent glutinous bond with car upholstery, we might have sprung for the leather seats.

Once we did upgrade the family car, however, I firmly declared a moratorium on back seat snacks. Eventually, though, I decided the constant whining was more than I could handle, so I relented. Then we tried switching to less crumbly snacks. But after I found a whole secret enclave of smushed, rotting grapes under one of the seats, I decided stale chips would be less revolting over time.

Realizing that I just couldn’t avoid the crumbs, I decided that maybe the kids would be a little more careful with their snacks if they had to clean up after themselves.

This is when I discovered a brilliant invention called the car vac. It is a portable vacuum that charges in the car and clearly was created by a mom with crumb issues like myself.

Suddenly our car was a thing of beauty and the mess was a thing of the past. I marveled at the fresh clean smell and crumb-less-ness. But mostly I was very, very impressed with myself for solving the problem.

Then one day my husband took the kids out in my car. I nervously awaited their return, and when they got back, I bolted for the car and threw open the back door.

It was pristine.

Smiling, I went around to the front to go drive to the market. But as I went to sit down, I happened to glance down at the driver’s seat.

Apparently, husbands + food in car ALSO = mess.This is a repeated Lost in Suburbia column, which has appeared in GateHouse Media newspapers since 2008. As Tracy Beckerman’s main column is shifting focus - her kids are grown and she has moved back to the city - we are rerunning her earlier work for readers who may have missed these the first time around. You can follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LostinSuburbiaFanPage/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tracybeckerman.

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